Stanza (UK)
Stanza is an internationally recognised artist, who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1984. His artworks have won twenty international art prizes and art awards including:- Vidalife 6.0 First Prize Spain. SeNef Grand Prix Korea. Videobrasil First Prize Brazil. Cynet Art First Prize Germany. Video Brasil First Prize. Share First Prize Winner Italy: Stanzas art has also been rewarded with a prestigious Nesta Dreamtime Award, an Arts Humanities Creative Fellowship and a Clarks bursary. Numerous commissions include work for Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Watermans Art Centre, FACT, and the Open Data Institute
His artworks have been exhibited with over one hundred exhibitions globally. Participating venues have included :- Venice Biennale: Victoria Albert Museum: Tate Britain: Mundo Urbano Madrid: Bruges Museum: TSSK Norway: State Museum, Novorsibirsk: Biennale of Sydney: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Mexico: Plymouth Arts Centre: ICA London: Sao Paulo Biennale: De Markten Brussels: Transport Museum London: Ars Nova museum.
Stanza artworks since the mid eighties have focused on the participatory system the 'city' that frames questions within his work opening up conversations about the politics of space. He creates investigations about the construction of space, the environment, and landscapes you cannot see. Selected artwork monitor the behaviours, activities, and changing information, of the world around us often using networked devices and information across the internet. This can include observation by means of custom made sensors, networked cameras and computers. Stanza reforms this information and data creating what he calls parallel realities.
Recurring themes throughout his career include the urban landscape, surveillance culture, privacy and alienation in the city. Stanza is interested in the patterns we leave behind as well real time networked events that can be re-imagined and sourced for information. He uses multiple new technologies to create distances between real time multi point perspectives that emphasize a new visual space. The purpose of this is to communicate feelings and emotions that we encounter daily which impact on our lives and which are outside our control. The results can be aesthetically beautiful maps of data or information such as personal interests, beliefs, and large scale installations representing weather, environmental, pollution and traffic data.
Stanza presents the city as a control system and various art projects have been made using live real time environmental data, surveillance and security data, news and real time information systems. The artworks 'The Emergent City' , 'Sonicity', 'Urban Generation' reform data, working with the idea of bringing data from outside into the inside, and then present it back out again in open ended systems where the public is often engaged in or directly embedded in the artwork. Interactive and visually appealing, his style also maintains the substantive power through multi-facetted content.
Stanza was one of the first to use internet art as a medium. Since 1995 his websites, net art and generative artworks have been one of his major artistic outputs.
Educated in art at Goldsmiths College in the early eighties he later went on to study at Greenwich University and Central Saint Martins Art College London. Stanza returned to Goldsmiths College as a AHRC arts research fellow.
His mediums include; netart, paintings, videos, installations, software systems and public artworks.